So, a little bit about me. I already mentioned that I work @UW and that I am a proud card-carrying statistician. I am also the mother of 3 extremely cute children — ages 6, 4, and 1. 1/
@UW My oldest was born the day I got my official tenure notification. This is a true story. She was unexpectedly born 5 weeks early, & my official tenure e-mail came in 2 hrs after she was born. I think she came early because she wanted to experience having a pre-tenure mother!!! 2/
@UW But of course, many/most women who want to become mothers don’t have the option to wait until tenure (or career/financial stability, more generally). It just isn't biologically realistic. (And, anyway, why should women be forced to schedule childbearing around their jobs?) 3/
@UW As any new (or not new) parent will tell you, though, having a child is A LOT OF WORK. And a lot of this work has to be done by mom. 4/
@UW Hey everyone, plz hold off for a sec before you start throwing tomatoes at me. Yes, your partner (if you have one) can and should do their part — and I’m incredibly fortunate to have a partner who has been an equal (or more than equal) co-parent on every step of this journey. 5/
@UW But the truth is that the process of being pregnant and giving birth is just truly incomparable. I’m talking 9 months (OK, OK, you caught me — for me, just 8) of having your body taken over by an incredibly demanding parasite. 6/
@UW Any Twilight fans in the house? Remember when Bella was pregnant with Renesmee and it basically destroyed her body? Like, she was eaten alive from the inside out? 7/
@UW Honest to god, that’s what pregnancy is really like, except that in the end nobody turns you into a vampire for a quick recovery; instead you need to spend the next 12 to 200 months trying to feel human again. 8/
@UW And you have to do all that while feeding a tiny little person around the clock from your bleeding nipples, while dealing with post partum mood swings and worse, and not getting more than 40 minutes of sleep in any 24 hour period. 9/
@UW But, why am I complaining? Don’t professors get maternity leave? Well, sort of. I got three months of “paid leave”. 10/
@UW But, what does that mean exactly? The university didn’t require my department to give me a teaching reduction — while they couldn’t force me to teach during the three months after I gave birth, they could have just scheduled my teaching for the non-maternity-leave quarters. 11/
@UW I was fortunate that my department chairs did give me a one-course teaching reduction for each of my pregnancies — but again, this was at their discretion, and it would have been within their rights not to reduce my teaching. 12/
@UW So, from the get go, I was in a situation of needing to act very grateful for something that, let’s be honest, should have been standard policy. 13/
@UW OK, so I got a one-course teaching reduction. We're good right? Wasn't the extra work of having a baby was offset by those hours I freed up by not teaching for those three months? 14/
@UW Well, no. Classroom teaching is only a tiny part of my job. The main part of my job is doing research, and mentoring my trainees in their research. 15/
@UW Research has to continue, because you can’t ignore an R&R with a deadline if you’ve given your heart and soul to a paper for the past 3 years. And trainees have to be supported: they put their trust in me, and I need to do right by them. Full stop. 16/
@UW So, the point is: maternity leave was not a real leave, it is more accurately described as a 40% workload reduction for 3 months. 17/
@UW But anyway, here’s the clincher: after your maternity leave is over, you are left to parent your child for the next 18 years. And that, my friends, is the hard part. If you don’t have kids, then imagine doing your exact same job, but with 168 fewer hours per week. 18/
@UW Oh, but you’d send your kid to daycare or get a nanny? OK, now imagine your job with 128 fewer hrs/week. Literally, that’s what parenting is like. If you normally work 50 hrs/week, then subtract 128, and now you’re doing your same job in -78 hours per week. I’m not kidding. 19/
@UW Add two more kids to the equation? Each one costs you -128 hours per week of work time (again, I’m assuming 40 hours/week of nanny/daycare), so I’m currently running a 384 hour per week work hour deficit. 20/
@UW Unless you have 3 kids, please don’t @ me with your peanut gallery comments that my math is off and that the effect of additional kids is not additive. I don’t want to hear it from anybody that surely kids sleep sometimes? I said what I said. 21/
@UW (And in case you’re wondering whether it really takes 168 hours a week to care for a child — yes, yes, it does. They don’t sleep and they have no self-preservation instinct..... 22/
@UW …Like, if they see something dangerous, they will run, not walk, to it. Kitchen knives, Tide detergent pods, open bodies of water, it doesn’t even matter. If they don’t know how to walk yet, they will crawl or even just roll to danger. It’s in their nature.) 23/
@UW And what about money? The calculation above assumes that you can afford childcare for your kids. How much does childcare cost? Well, basically, the answer is, it costs all of your money. 24/
@UW I just got an email from my uni saying that a new subsidized daycare is available for faculty. How much does it cost? $2,625/month, AFTER THE SUBSIDY. That is literally more than a grad student makes in an entire month. I just can’t. 25/
@UW So, being a parent means doing your job, with negative hours, and also negative money. 26/
@UW So the point is: every single thing about kids is hard: gestating them, birthing them, recovering from gestating/birthing, keeping them alive, raising them, and affording them. 27/
@UW At least the first half of this is done entirely by women. And many/most women who have children in academia are not yet at a stable career stage. So, basically, this is all super hard. 28/
@UW And please don’t even get me started on how all of these issues are exacerbated by being in the middle of a pandemic. I can’t even. I’m saving it for another thread. 29/
@UW So — what’s the point? I got tenure within 2 hrs of having kids, and still, raising them is the hardest thing I’ve done in my life — despite having a very stable career, a very supportive partner, disposable income, & my kids are are (thank god) healthy/happy/delightful. 30/
@UW Like, I had always thought the hard part would be getting tenure: but no, I was wrong, the hard part was sleep training my first born. And then my second born. And then also my third born. 31/
@UW So when you meet an academic mother: appreciate that she is a hero. A fighter. Plz consider building a statue in her honor. B/c she is doing all of the things that make her an academic bad-ass, and also working 168 hrs/week per child, which means that she has negative hours. 32/
@UW And again, thanks to all the awesome non-birth-parents and supportive partners out there. You are amazing and you deserve to be celebrated!!! We should have a holiday for you!!! But that’s not what this thread is about. 33/
@UW Please don’t @ me unless you’ve had a literal (OK, figurative) vampire trying to claw their way out of your uterus for 9 (OK, 8) months. 34/34
